A few months ago, I travelled with my six-year-old daughter to Hong Kong. As we made our way out of the airport and boarded a train, we shared a brief moment that gave me pause to reflect on how different her conception of the world will be from the one I grew up with. We sat down on immaculate seats, surrounded by LED screens. She looked around and said: “Wow Daddy, we don’t have trains like this back in London.”
As the week wore on, and she pointed out other things that she had never seen back home, her comment about the high-speed train took on a broader resonance. Used to Britain’s strained and crumbling public transport, my little girl had identified how economic power has migrated to a different model of capitalism over the past generation.
